“If you build it, he will come.” This quote, from the movie Field of Dreams, captures the hopes of many marketers: write great content on your blog, and an audience will be magically attracted to you. Thanks to Google this is partially true, but are there things that you can do to help the process along? The answer, of course is yes. To start, consider the following ideas:
This post, however, is an example of a completely different way to grow your readership: create content clusters of related blog posts, and then cross-link them. It stands to reason that if a person lands on one particular blog post, they may have an interest in closely related posts. Planning several blog posts around a particular theme - planning the posts in clusters instead of simple individual posts – can make this happen.
The second benefit of this is that these clusters are ready-made raw material for a longer white-paper or other form factor. (More on repurposing content.)
This week’s action plan: Planning future blog post clusters is great, but what about everything you’ve written in the past? This week, go through your archives, and identify the clusters where you can graft cross-links after the fact.
Bonus Blog Bit: Beyond the in-line cluster strategy, there are a number of WordPress plug-ins that automatically identify related posts; while not perfect, these also can help generate more internal connections – and readership.
No one cares about you – they care about how you can solve their problems. Write for your readers.
These two expressions epitomize the most important marketing (and social media) concept: relevance. How often have you seen a post, picture, tweet, or comment that adds zero value? Or where the signal-to-noise ratio is, well, noisy?
When it comes to using social media as a professional tool, there is a subtle shift that must happen. Instead of a self (or corporate) focus, the post must be designed to be user-relevant, and user-focused. It’s true that celebrities (and politicians) often break this rule, but they would do better if they were more relevant.
Social relevance isn’t rocket science – here are five tips that can help:
- Define the primary and secondary audience for your Facebook and Twitter updates, tweets, videos, and blogs.
- Define the overall goal and the high level messaging that you need each audience to adopt.
- Brainstorm on the key information needs of the target audiences. And if you’re not sure, ask. The intersection of this and your goal/messaging should define your overall theme.
- Brainstorm specific post topics within this theme.
- Seek to engage, not just broadcast. A great barometer of relevance is the degree of engagement. If there are no shares, likes, or comments, your post may not have hit the mark.
This week’s action plan: What’s your signal-to-noise ratio? This week, review all of your social posts, using this five-point checklist as your criteria. (Are the posts really written for a targeted audience? Does it appear that there is an underlying goal? Are the topic choices important to the audience? And on a similar theme? Is there engagement?) If the posts are too wide-ranging and diffuse, then start writing for your reader: they will care about you once you begin solving their problems.
Competitive insight: Reviewing your competitor’s social posts can often give you insight to their marketing strategy: reverse engineering what they have been saying, provides visibility to their priorities and goals.
Postscript: Read the last 30 (or 300) posts of mine at www.RandallCraig.com: What is my signal-to-noise ratio?
Note: The Make It Happen Tipsheet is also available by email. Go to www.RandallCraig.com to register.
Randall Craig
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